“Cult of witchcraft today… Their secret rituals exposed…” teased the lobby posters for Legend of the Witches when it came out in 1970. Also on the posters – silhouettes of naked young women in full cavort.
You get a lot more of the former – the rituals – than the cavorting (though there’s still plenty) in this oddity from Michael Leigh, a thoughtful and not disrespectful documentary about witchcraft ancient and modern, its lore and rituals. See it as a companion piece to The Wicker Man, maybe, which came along three years later. Its director, Robin Hardy, and writer Anthony Shaffer, had surely watched Leigh’s film as they were researching their own.
It starts off portentously with waves crashing and clouds scudding across the sky as a voice sonorously booms, “In the beginning was the moon…” before going on to detail the witches’ legend of creation – the moon goddess, Diana, and the sun god, Lucifer (“Lucifer” means light, we’re told), getting it on and giving birth to the universe
Leigh cuts to the present day and into the woods at night, where a blindfolded naked man is being led by a naked woman to a pool where his head is dunked. This is the Water section of his initiation ritual. Air, Earth and Fire follow.
For the factually inclined there is lore and history – of the derivation of the name witch, from Wicca, Anglo-Saxon word for wise, before Leigh runs us through a slew of stuff we might have already gleaned from various sources. The importance of standing stones (like those at Stonehenge). Witches as wise women who knew about the healing effects of various herbs. Divination from the innards of a chicken. The borrowing of symbols from Christianity, and the persecution of witches by this upstart religion. Flying, fertility rites and the kissing of the devil’s arse – the buttocks of the priest in the re-enactment we see.
Leigh’s film dwells on a particularly nasty case: the torture of a pregnant young woman, to drive home how barbaric the Christian church could be. And then he’s on again, more up to date now, at a museum in Cornwall where modern-day occultist Cecil Williamson (1909-1999) collected witch artefacts – we see cauldrons, a pestle and mortar, a griddle and kettle. You might want to point out at this point that these are items you’d find in any kitchen before the modern world came along – does that make them more innocent or more suspect?
The most fascinating bit for me was Leigh’s detailing of the remnants of the old religion in the modern world: in children’s games, superstition, horseshoes and the significance of certain days, like Friday 13th. And there’s clearly – though Leigh never says so – some read-across from witch rituals to the counterculture of the late 1960s, the psychedelics and dancing with hazy abandon.
Interspersed with this educational material, regular returns to the night-time rituals of the coven. There is a no-names-no-pack-drill aspect to this side of the film, though in fact the “naked” devotees on screen are Alex Sanders, aka King of the Witches, and his wife, Maxine, plus members of their London coven, Alexandrian Witchcraft (Alex is now dead but Alex has a website – maxinesanders.com – and continues to practice).
The rich voiceover by Guy Standeven is one from another age – suggesting masculine authority – its earnestness a token of the seriousness of the film. No one involved is aiming for pornography or even salaciousness.
I’m not entirely sure how the section towards the end fitted in, which went into the detection of ghosts using thermometers, various bits of electronic kit and young women said to be sensitive to these things. Leigh seemed to have wandered from witches to the occult more generally. And the section on scrying – seeing into the future – could maybe be included in that bracket as well.
But it’s a fascinating film, both an artefact from another age and a rich overview of the state of British witchcraft as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s. With Halloween, or Samhain, upon us, it’s well worth a squint.
Legend of the Witches (box set with Secret Rites) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
